Ensure the FileWave Client is Always Running

[AnEngelsen]

Sometimes, the FileWave Client service stops running. If this happens, the laptop/desktop device will no longer communicate with the FileWave Server.

(In my experience) this behavior occurs more often on Windows devices, especially after deploying the FWwinclient upgrade fileset.

As such, I created the following (2) filesets:

Script - Verify FileWave Client is Running (macOS): Loads a LaunchAgent that runs a shell script (once an hour) to verify that the fwcld service is running. If not, the fwcld service is restarted.

Script - Verify FileWave Client is Running (Win): Creates a scheduled task that runs once an hour. The task calls a .ps1 script that verifies that the FileWaveWinClient service is running. If not, the service is started.

Both filesets are attached to this post.

If the FileWave client is failing to start, try manually starting the service.
Windows: Services app -> FileWave Client -> Start Service
macOS: sudo fwcontrol client start

If that doesn't work, a ticket should be opened with FileWave support.

FilesetExport_VerifyFileWaveClientIsRunning.zip

[AnEngelsen]

On second thought, my macOS fileset can probably be ignored. The fwcld service is set to "relaunch on crash".

The Windows service has no such safeguards. This might be a good feature request. (Attempt to restart the FileWaveWinClient service if the service fails/stops.)

[Josh Levitsky]

@AnEngelsen Taking your idea of just setting the recovery options I made a fileset that does that for Windows. It just uses sc.exe to do this...

sc failure FileWaveWinClient reset= 86400 actions=restart/60000/restart/60000/restart/60000

What I haven't tested yet is if I'm on FW 14.8.0 and have this set how I want and then upgrade to 14.9.2 does it persist the setting? This would be good to test to see if it stays. If it didn't persist then maybe doing this via a custom field might be better to have it keep setting it but I don't like that overhead of setting it over and over. I have also mentioned this to development that maybe we should be setting this to recover from the start without needing to set it with a fileset like this. 

Set FileWave Win Client Recovery.fileset.zip

[Josh Levitsky]

Note that FileWave 14.10.x and beyond do this automatically on Windows so you shouldn't need this fileset at all any more. 

-Josh